Scarlet Witch is a powerful superhero whose innate hexes can warp reality around her. She's also an accomplished magician who fits at home with the high echelons of sorcery in the Marvel Universe, including Doctor Doom, Doctor Voodoo, and the current Sorcerer Supreme, Doctor Strange. But just like her hex bolts cause anything they hit to falter and break, her magic has a habit of going horribly awry. When that happens, it takes another high-level mage to intervene, whether that means working with her or standing against her.
In the new issue Empyre: X-Men #4, the Wandavision star has done something abominable to mutantkind once again, and Stephen Strange fixed it with the dutiful resignation of a plumber working a clog.
Scarlet Witch wasn't always a mage. Originally, Wanda Maximoff was merely a mutant whose power created bad luck around her that could be fired at a target. Then she joined the Avengers, where the ancient witch Agatha Harkness revealed that she was using genuine magic and trained her to understand it. Then the trouble started: she married the Vision and attempted to conjure twin children for them, but the spell broke and the grief drove her to an emotional breakdown. Her powers went haywire and tried to kill the Avengers, who had to work with Doctor Strange to defeat her. The enraged, delirious Wanda cast a spell that depowered 98 percent of the world's mutants, killing many of them. (It was later retconned that Doctor Doom had convinced her to become possessed by a cosmic entity, shifting the blame for these outbursts onto him.)
Her magic came from the elder god Chthon, who enchanted her in the womb as a sorcerous vessel he could possess. In the Secret Empire storyline, when HYDRA took over the United States and the Avengers, HYDRA mages caused Chthon to take over Wanda's body. Thor fought her until she fell, then Doctor Strange exorcised her, allowing her to join the resistance forces. The storyline of Empyre: X-Men is caused by a mistake that might be even more gruesome than her elimination of mutants from the world. She asks for Doctor Strange's help to undo the "no more mutants" spell, but he tells her that the atrocity is too great to reverse and suggests that she do something good to counterbalance it instead. So she attempts to revive the sixteen million mutants who had been killed at Genosha... and accidentally turns them into ravenous zombies instead.
Issue 4 reveals what she did when she discovered the effect of her spell: she took a sheepish second visit to Doctor Strange's sanctum. He retraced her steps, realigning the mystical forces she called on to undo each other. He discharged the spell, allowing it to fall apart in a month's time. (This meant that the entire conflict of Empyre: X-Men resolves itself when that timer runs out, but that's okay, because it was all an excuse to write a story with the tagline "Plants vs. Zombies vs. X-Men vs. Old Ladies".)
If this pattern of Wanda going off the rails and requiring one of her peers (most often an older man) to rein her in sounds like a reinforced gender stereotype, that's a completely fair reading. Scarlet Witch is one of Marvel's oldest characters, hailing from the Silver Age days when some creators (most notably, Stan Lee) wrote men as patronizing chauvinists and women as irrational, undependable naifs. The Wasp and the Invisible Woman (then called "Invisible Girl") have aged out of that portrayal... but Scarlet Witch now more than ever is defined by her failures.
Marvel's Empyre: X-Men #4 is available now.